Andy Bargery, Client Director at Oystercatchers, breaks down the key ingredients of how brands and their agencies can optimise their creative output to get consumers to take action.
Shifting consumer behaviour isn’t easy. If you want to convince an audience to buy your product over another, or perhaps to buy more of your product than they already do (without resorting to a short-term sales promotion), there’s compelling evidence to suggest you need to make them feel something.
You need to stir an emotion in your audience when they see your communications; make them laugh, make them cry, shock them, or make them feel all warm and fuzzy inside.
Think about the advertising you remember most vividly, and I bet it makes you feel one of these emotions.
I love to laugh. We all do, right? But advertising that makes me laugh out loud sticks in my mind more than any other. Here’s an example of one of my favourite ads, which is from cigar brand Hamlet back in 1987:
Or how about this cracker from Heineken:
It’s interesting the two ads that stand out for me are both from the 1980s; it’s not recent work, although I’m sure there are more recent examples I could draw on too.
The problem is, it’s not that easy to produce ads that make people feel an emotion. In fact, it’s very hard. And because our audiences are increasingly resistant to advertising, we have to work even harder. But you must make your audience feel something if you want to change their behaviour.
So how do you do that? What does your creative agency need from you in order to deliver work that invokes belly laughter over boredom, or tears over indifference?
Creative Excellence Training
These are the factors we explore in our creative excellence training courses; the most recent of which we delivered for a large retailer in Toronto, Canada. Over two-days we took them through a Creative Skills Bootcamp, breaking down the key ingredients of how they and their agencies can deliver impactful, award winning advertising and communications.
We covered everything from:
- getting your strategy right in the first place
- defining an audience based on a common challenge rather than demographics
- identifying an insight that fuels a great creative brief
- how to write a great creative brief
- working in partnership with an agency
These are the tools your creative agency needs to deliver work that you’ll remember in 30-40 years’ time, like the Hamlet and Heineken ads from the Eighties.
But we didn’t stop there in our Bootcamp session, we also explored what it takes to evaluate creativity in a way that removes the tyranny of subjectivity (hat tip to my friend Tas for that expression). How you can determine if the advertising put before you both meets the brief, is on brand, and is big enough to make an impact. Also, how can you feedback on creative work in a way that drives performance and long-term relationship building with your creative partners.
At Oystercatchers, we do this type of training regularly and it’s always fantastic fun. We show examples of phenomenal advertising and communications throughout… ads that make you laugh, and ads that make you cry – don’t worry, we bring tissues. We scatter practical exercises throughout so our cohorts leave having practiced the skills we teach. We don’t just talk at you for hours on end.
We’re on a mission to drive excellence in marketing and while communication is only one of the 4Ps, it’s surely got to be the most fun.
Find out more about our creative excellence training here or get in touch if you want to explore what a Creative Skills Bootcamp might look like for your brand.